70: Dr. Jaiya John on Leaving Well and Storytelling as a Garden During Transitions
Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on ancient Indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, poet, author, teacher, and speaker. Jaiya is the founder of Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression. The mission has donated thousands of Jaiya’s books in support of social healing, and offers grants to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of numerous books, including Daughter Drink This Water, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, Fragrance After Rain, and Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution.
Jaiya writes, narrates, and produces the podcast, I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John, and is the founder of The Gathering, a global initiative and tour reviving traditional gathering and storytelling practices to fertilize social healing and liberation.
He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University, and has spoken to over a million people worldwide and audiences as large as several thousand. Jaiya holds doctorate and master’s degrees in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations.
As an undergraduate, he attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan Holistic Medicine through independent research with Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.
Main quote:
“You cannot calendar well being. You cannot calendar healing in a workplace. Accountability speaks to the idea that if I'm not breathing, I'm dying. Consistent investment in healing and well being and growth in your organization day to day, not calendared because that says that it's not actually a priority. If it were a priority, it wouldn't be on a calendar. If staff appreciation were a priority, you wouldn't have one staff appreciation day a year.”
Additional quotes:
“Storytelling for us is a way of breathing, meaning that on the inhale we draw in the sediment, the nutrient of meaning from the world around us, from the people in our lives, we're drawing in meaning which orients us to the moment, this is the meaning of this moment.”
“You can walk into a workplace in the morning and feel the mood of the day.”
“The storytelling that says the way we treat each other in our staff meeting is intimately tied to how we are going to treat each other in the hallways, and in the break room, in the cafeteria, at our desks, in our offices, and how we treat each other via email communications and phone calls and how we treat our clients, how we treat the community.”
“Change and transition is, of course, the nature of life. It's happening in every moment. The question is how do we relate to it?”
To connect with Dr. Jaiya:
Also mentioned: Podcast episode with J.S. Park
Take the Transition Readiness assessment
To learn more about Leaving Well
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley
Transcript:
Dr. Jaya John was orphaned born on ancient indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, poet, author, teacher, and speaker. Dr. Jaya is the founder of the Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression.
The mission has donated thousands of Dr. Jaya's books in support of social healing and offers grants to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of numerous books, including Daughter, Drink This Water, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, Fragrance After Rain. And freedom medicine words for your brave revolution.
He also wrote, which is the book that I have that I am so madly in love with your caring heart renewal for helping professionals and systems. Dr. Jaya writes and narrates and produces the podcast. I will read for you and is the founder of the gathering a global initiative and tour reviving traditional gathering and storytelling practice to fertilize social healing and liberation.
He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University and has spoken to over a million people worldwide, and audiences as large as several thousand. He holds doctorate and master's degrees in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations.
As an undergrad, he attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan holistic medicine through independent research with Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mount Everest. His indigenous soul dreams of fry bread, sweet grass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.
I'm really excited to bring A conversation with Dr. Jaya John to you today. I have long been a fan of Dr. Jaya's work. I love his book, Your Caring Heart, and I think some of the things that I'm really excited for you to listen for is the conversation around misunderstandings and missed opportunities, as well as letting change breathe.
There's also a really through line that we talked about throughout this conversation about consistency and how important it is inside movement building and inside of nonprofit work and inside of leadership. There's also a really powerful moment that I really want you to listen to when we talked about caring and culture.
Dr. Jaya makes a really fabulous and powerful point about the organisms that we've agreed to. I hope that you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Okay, Dr. Jaya, we have, we've already been chatting, uh, before I hit record. So I said, let's hit record because we're missing some good stuff. We were just going to talk about our connection.
And this is the first time that we've been in space together. I first got your book, uh, your caring heart. And for the folks that will be watching on YouTube, it's a beautiful, amazing book. And I just been following your work, um, for quite some time. This book is, I'm sure like everyone else who has it. I have underlined and dog eared and put pages down to the side and underlined some more.
There's so many annotations, and it's something that I refer, uh, to everyone that I know in the nonprofit space. So I'm just, I'm thankful that you said yes to this conversation. Thank you, Naomi. I, I, um, I'm grateful. You know, I could feel your spirit and your heart. Across the distances, you know, all this time and I just want to really appreciate you in this moment for your deep caring heart.
You're one of the souls that this book is really seeking to honor and celebrate. And support and nourish and you are clearly one of those. So thank you for the honor of your invitation and for holding this sacred space today. I appreciate it so much. Yeah. Yeah. Same. And I, I think that this conversation could go a lot of different ways.
I think for the purposes of the folks that are likely listening, it will be around the workplace, but the workplace mirrors the workplace. The rest of our lives. So I think there will be good takeaways. And so I'm encouraging you as you listen to this conversation to really lean into what makes you feel uncomfortable or what might be challenging or stretching you.
And then definitely check out Dr. Jaya's work, uh, either on social media, Substack. books, the way that you offer your gifts into the world are numerous. And so I encourage listeners to take advantage of that. Could we start by talking a little bit about your caring heart and the concept of mutual care? I think inside of professional settings, of course, but then also as the time of this recording, you live in the LA area.
And so, you know, we're watching in real time. Mutual care and sometimes how that can not work so well. What would you say to organizations and individuals about embodying the principle of mutual care? Maybe generally or specifically around transitions and departures? That question taps into so many places inside of me, within my personal journey as a human being, within my professional journey, my journey of servitude, supporting our healing and well being.
And so, wow, there's so much I could say about mutual care. What comes to me first is that in a society like ours, speaking of the, we could say the United States, but really we're speaking of these, and I don't like the term, I think it's a cop out term, but Western societies, cultures of hyper individualism, competition.
Extreme competition, conquest, control, and accumulation, hoarding. These values. If we are born into or raised up in, and we exist in and we work and live in and raise our families in cultures that have these values, uh, which I say are an hypothetical to indigenous ways, it can be. Although mutual care is something that is just a language for a very organic, uh, way of being.
It's really a description of how life operates. The symbiosis of all living things, um, is that they're, we are caring for each other, all organisms, from the, the mineral to the molecular, the cellular, plant, animal, insect, sky, wind, earth, trees. And us, we're engaged in, um, in endless Dance of mutuality, but for those of us who've been conditioned by these cultures that fragment everything in the universe into parts and pieces that can be then valued, bought and sold and commodified and used for art.
Extraction and exploitation and manipulation, if we have been and first we must acknowledge that we have been conditioned by these cultural values, it can become a challenge for us to open to the promise and potentiality of what it means to care mutually. There's a deeply embedded training in us, Naomi, that says, I have to look out for me.
I have to get mine. I have to watch my own back. I have to lift myself up by my own bootstrap. So there is that societal, national, cultural ethos speaking to us deeply. It's saying that don't trust, don't trust that others are going to care for you. Be wary, be wary, be wary. So in that fear and distrust, our relationship with what we are calling you and I today, mutual care.
That relationship can be, um, a more tenuous one that it needs to be a more, uh, dubious one than it needs to be. If we're able to just remember our indigenous selves, remember our ancestral ways of being, we can start to see this miraculous interconnectedness of all things. And so, for me, the concept of mutual care is, um, is a deeply meaningful one.
A personal one. The reason it ended up in this book. You're caring heart is because I spent years Naomi going into systems that had leaders leadership administrators asking me to come in all around this country. Other countries. Can you come in? Our staff aren't doing well issues with morale burnout. Um, you know, people were not in a good condition, right?
And so I spent many years in these spaces and, um, I'm grateful for those moments, but they also took an incredible toll on me because I was immersing myself in toxicity. I was immersing myself in the outputs of our. Dehumanizing, uh, ways of being our, our systems, uh, are, are deeply dehumanizing, siphoning of soul, oppressive of spirit, impeding of expressive, creative flow, sanctioning of our singularity, our each soul has a singularity in the workplace that is divine and sacred.
And so I, I witnessed the unwellness that we are. And I kept arriving at the idea that in these system spaces, in these workplaces, you had souls who were designed to be in mutuality, kinship, relationship, feeding each other. This is our human design. And they would come into these spaces. And you would see a predictable and steady decline in their wellbeing.
And I just wanted to, you know, as a human being, as a social psychologist, um, as a, as a caring heart myself, I just wanted to examine and investigate what are the roots of why consistently in these spaces we find unwellness where people may have arrived into the work. With a joie de vivre with a, like they've come out of their graduate program or their undergraduate program and they got their degrees and they're feeling good.
They're feeling excited and they want to help people. They want to help humanity. And very quickly you see this decline, you can chart it. The movement, as I say, uh, from being Winnie the Pooh to being Eeyore, too. So that slippery slope into, um, pessimism, despair, depression, fatigue and exhaustion, compassion fatigue, burnout, malaise.
And feeling unsafe within your own self as a, as a worker and in your environment. So mutual care for me, is this the idea simply that our natural design, our nature, our essential makeup is. To be interwoven with one another in a way that is symbiotic, that is, um, enlisted in the cause of lifting us up in a collective way, caring for sustaining, feeding, nourishing, sheltering, protecting, advocating for growing and healing collectively.
This is our design and mutual care speaks to the necessity. For a workplace to foster such a culture, it speaks to the cost when a workplace does not foster such a culture, the cost to the employees, the cost to the, um, enterprise itself, including the red, the red line that they care so much about, you know, the financial costs, but the cost and the toll is vast.
And so I'll leave that there for the moment, uh, for you to just. Um, do what you do with, no, do what you do with, make it do what it do. Well, and I, I also think that talking about the red line of the financial piece of it, it also starts to impact the broader system around funding and philanthropy. And if you have a team of tired folks who are all those things that you mentioned with the malaise and with the burnout and all of those things.
It becomes harder to storytell about the mission that you're trying to accomplish when you then have to turn your sights towards trying to get funding and trying to get philanthropy. So it's, it's this endless, uh, a cycle. And I'm curious, you talk about all these, I mean, this book, literally, it's, it's so Tiny in like stature, but it's so rich in I mean literally every page and and for those who haven't read it Dr.
Jai, you write it almost as though it's tidbits In my experience, you can open the book to any page and there is a bite sizable thing that you can read and then absorb it. You don't have to start from the front and go to the back, which is one of the reasons I love it. Anyway, I digress. I, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about storytelling, especially as it relates to being a tool for healing and transformation.
I think that we get So caught up in the capitalism and the marketing and the how are we going to tell the story of what we do. But storytelling can be healing and restorative from your vantage point. And I would love for you to talk about that maybe a little bit and how storytelling from an individual level or inside of a workplace.
Can be transformative. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Naomi. I'd like to say that, you know, as someone who, you know, when you write a book, one of the, the, uh, most beautiful pleasures is to have a conversation with someone who has truly read the book. Like they have felt it, they have moved their way through word by word.
And so. And now they are engaging with you, uh, from a place of harvest. They, they themselves have harvested their own meaning from the, from the word garden and that produce. And so you bringing that to us today, and I really appreciate you for that. Storytelling, as you can see from your own reading, is at the heart of this particular book, but it's also at the heart of my understanding, again, of our human nature.
And what are the elements and ingredients that are necessary for us to be well, I always come back to that, you know, who, who are we, what, what have we been made for and what nourishes us and then what in its absence causes a depletion, a decline, a wilting of the willow, you know, a dying of the blossom and storytelling is something I think more and more are of us are arriving at as we remember together Uh, who we really are.
This has been about a 500 year, or you could say 2000 year season of forgetting that has to do with, um, the nature of colonialism and conquest and killing of indigenous light, wisdom, understanding, accumulated knowledge over thousands and thousands of years, uh, the, this violent conquest era, uh, Has created a, um, and an amnesia like what happens to us when we get into a car accident and we have a brain trauma.
We've been experiencing a centuries old trauma that has caused us to forget in this case. Why storytelling is so vital for us in our personal lives and in our professional spaces and in the work that we do. Storytelling for us is a way of breathing, meaning that On the inhale, we draw in the sediment, the nutrient of meaning from the world around us, from the people in our lives, we're drawing in meaning, which orients us to the moment.
This is the, this is the meaning of this moment. How do we know? Because your people are expressing their own, each particular Experience with this moment. They're giving you their meaning. They're storytelling to you by their facial expressions, their mood, their body language, their tone of voice, their silence, their boisterousness there.
You can walk into a workplace in the morning and feel the mood of the day. Yes, we can. We're that energetically attuned to each other. So that's the inhale, the exhale of storytelling is us expressing out into the world, the meaning that we are gathering along our journey. That includes our pain, our hurt, our trauma, our memories, our, um, visionary inspiration, our ideas for what we could be, our creative impulses, our resourcefulness, our higher cognition, our fears, our, our lizard brain fears and hate and anger and resentment.
We're expressing outward. The story of what this existence is feeling like to us in the moment, and sometimes those stories are not, uh, I would like to say, Naomi, sometimes our storytelling outward, just as the storytelling inward can be our storytelling outward can be distorted. It can, it can, it can be not a reflection of our true soul, but a reflection of our fears, our frustrations, our resentments, our hurt, us crying out.
So now the story becomes acid and we have to caretake what is happening if acid is being passed around the workplace between our colleagues and our leadership. So storytelling is a garden that we need to give our loving care. We need to consistently feed and water it and provide it sunlight. The sunlight of sharing the water of emotionality, the food of affirmation to have your leadership, encourage storytelling, storytelling, specifically though of successes.
What are the things that are working for my team, for my group, my division, uh, in this workplace, in our collective endeavor? What are the, what are the. Experiences we're having that seem to be fruitful and beneficial what happens in a workplace under the duress of time limitations, resource limitations, high turnover rates, toxic interpersonal behavior, distrust between leadership and staff in both directions.
What happens is the fruitful, fertile. Revitalizing storytelling tends to get suppressed and oppressed and buried under the sediment of toxic storytelling, which is the doom storytelling of an Eeyore. So no matter what is going on each day, Hey man, how you doing today? Um, Oh, no. And you know, and so this is a person who started off in their career.
They were Winnie the Pooh. They showed up. Hey, hey, I'm going to help people. I'm here. Let's go, y'all. Let's go, y'all. And they were immediately met by a tribe of Eeyores who have already been socialized and beaten down. Their coworkers saying, Hey, man, We don't, we don't get down like that. We don't, you're a little too joyful.
You're a little too positive. Your energy's here, but we're existing down here because this is the organism we have agreed to develop together passively. We've agreed to develop this organism, which is the culture of our workplace. And it's a living, breathing thing. And every day we come here and we feed it with our negative stories.
We, we bring it to the trough and we give it the slop. And in some ways it's comforting for us. It exists as gossip and, you know, backstabbing and complaints and lament. We wrap it around us as though it's a sacred blanket, but in fact, it's an infected blanket. And so now we're infecting each other. And we need help.
We're dying here in a workplace. I love what you just said about this is the organization or the organism that we've agreed to because culture exists whether it exists. And so it's it's up to us to feed it. Something that came up for me when you were talking was something that I implemented. Years ago at a nonprofit, I was leading a team of about 12 people, and we were, I was realizing that we were having a hard time with storytelling, we were having a hard time showing up in our own perspectives and lived experiences, and then sharing, not that I wanted their story to have to be shared with the mission or for the people we served.
Anyway, I said, what if we do a potluck? And everyone kind of groaned, well, I don't want to do a potluck. And I said, no, specifically, we're going to call it I heart food from home. And we're going to bring a dish that reminds us of our childhood. And it kind of was on the fly. I just thought, let's just do something fun.
What ended up happening, Dr. Jaya was our team of 12, each brought something that. did remind them of their childhood, but what came with it was the stories behind the why. So someone brought macaroni and cheese with hot dogs cut up in it. That's not a typical thing you would bring to a workplace potluck, but when he shared why, and I didn't ask people to share it, it just kind of happened organically.
He said, I want to share why, this is, this is what my food from home is. He shared the story of poverty in his childhood, and that adding hot dogs to the macaroni and cheese was one of the things that That his mom did to make it special. Um, someone else, um, is from Pakistan. And so he brought this amazing doll and through sharing doll with everyone shared about his story and it was just the most magical moment.
The rest of the organization then said, we want to do it. And our team said, we'll host it again. And then you can join us. And it just. That little bit of storytelling that kind of happened organically was so powerful and it shifted the culture of the way that our team worked together from then on because we knew a little bit more about each other, but it was around the gathering of food.
And so I'm not saying that that idea and run with it, but like you said, look for what's working in your organization and expand that. Let others let others in on the secret when you have something to go. There you go, because our stories, our, our, our fertility, our beauty at work gets siloed, does it not, Naomi, where other colleagues or sectors of the organization don't even hear about the good things happening.
It just becomes siloed. Um, what does tend to travel in organization is the negativity and the lament, uh, the morose it's, it travels like a, a giant, heavy, dense cloud. Um, like we're having now with these, these fire smoke, but the beautiful stories. The feel good stories that could serve to help heal the energy and aura of the workplace that could serve to soothe the aching hearts of workers who are having a hard time in their personal life.
Those stories Tend to, uh, just be suppressed. They sort of stay on the ground. And so we have to think creatively about ways to get them up and circulating through the workplace, just like the AC system or the eating system that circulate our stories. Let's find ways together. And I loved what you said about, uh, the food, because by inviting the souls who've been on a generational journey with food, inviting them to bring that.
Aspect of themselves into the workplace, the food itself is a story and then the way that they share about the food becomes the frosting on the cake. If you will, it becomes the, the, the expansion of the store or the deepening and the richening the seasoning of the store, but even the food itself can help to humanize because you might have a coworker who you don't know at all.
You're not familiar with the culture they come from. And so you don't know quite what to make of them. They they're like a, a flattened one dimensional cartoon character to you because you don't know them, you don't engage with them, but if they bring food that is of them, that is them. Now, in a way without even a single word being spoken, they have become more human in your eyes.
Because they've been able to bring an aspect of their beingness into what is often a, a robot, a a robotic kind of deadening place we call work, um, that asks of us to put ourselves away in storage bins and get to work. I did a similar thing as what you described when I was a professor at Howard University in Washington DC and you know, I would be teaching social psychology classes.
And these students were from all over the world, Naomi, and so one thing that I just started doing, it just came from my heart. I've always loved to cook and bake and garden, anything nurturing like that. I also love, of course, poetry and, you know, it's all poetry to me. It's all love expression. It's all love, uh, the way that love flowers and blooms and invites, um, the pollinators of life who would sell.
And so I just started sharing poetry in class to begin class. Here's a social psychology class and a professor on one of these, you know, university campuses that can be so stodgy. And so, you know, conventional, you know, this is the way we do education and it was, it was not alive enough. And so I wanted the students.
To experience something that simply felt good so that their association with being in class and coming to class actually felt good instead of bringing up dread. And so I would, I would love on them with poetry and I would love on them by baking foods and bringing them to class and, uh, cooking foods, bringing them to class dishes that were of me.
And by bringing them into class and letting the whole space in the undergrad. Uh, lecture classes, this was a couple of hundred people deep in an auditorium and you're filling up that whole room with the aroma of the food, right? And, and then the sound of the poetry, something beautiful happened. The students, they just, it was like plants being watered.
They started to, to come alive. You know, you'd see the brothers in the back of the room who were kicked back, you know, sort of checking out on life so symbolically, and they would, you know, sit up forward. But the students. Start us to do this, Naomi. They started, I did encourage them verbally, but it was more, I think the spirit of the room encouraged them.
Most of all, they started feeling safe and encouraged to bring food from their culture, from their family, from their childhood, they started to bring poetry and music and we would have, we would have concerts. Basically I'm, I'm reciting spoken word. A student is playing the saxophone standing on my desk and we were getting down like that.
And so the, the registration. Um, became overwhelmed for the classes that everyone wanted to get in the classes. Some of the other professors were giving me side eye because the students weren't signing up for their classes, right? But this was not about the cold calculus academically of social psychology.
This was about the living, breathing, heated, passionate, thumping, pulsing nature of what a human being is, which these students were. And class became a whole nother thing. So for those workplaces, whether you are staff or leadership, which, by the way, is a is a false segregation that we could have a whole nother conversation about whoever you are.
within that organism. If you want the organism to feel better to you and to feel more hospitable for you. And if you want your coworkers to also feel better coming to work, being at work, if you want the so called outcomes of your work to actually be more penetrative into the condition enduringly of the communities that you may serve, If you want these things, if this is what you yearn for and desire, then that organism itself is available to you as something that you can put these kind of ingredients into.
You can season up and spice up that organism. That is your workplace culture. You have power in that. You are not a helpless baby bird showing up to work, just dealing with it. No, you are actually the recipe. You're the recipe and it's, and it's necessary for us to really live in our power in that way when we think about our relationship with the work and whether we should stay or go and how we're being treated or how it's feeling to us.
You are a divine recipe and you are bringing that to work. And the only question is whether you open up the jar and share your stuff. That was a whole word. I mean, Talk about a beautiful calling into accountability. And I, I agree around everyone has leadership and is a leader. And that is a whole nother conversation, but it's, you know, hit rewind on that part that Dr.
Jaya just shared. It is, it is up to each of us. And, and I, it made me think of this and I'm so glad I found it. So I want to read this, if this is okay, this section, uh, talking about disillusionment and despair. And a lot of it's around burnout, but what, what brought it to mind was when you were talking about being We have the recipe.
Disillusionment and despair are not just unfortunate states. They are also indicators. They suggest what is missing. We become cultivators working with whatever presents itself to us, whether it comes from us or from others. And then this is the last part. Despair is not an end point. It is the beginning of understanding how to create conditions in which our tribe does not despair.
Hope, faith, trust, honesty, kindness, purpose, meaning, consistency. All are just some of the countless seeds for a systems garden where despair does not grow. And that is just so poignant and powerful. And also just as such a reminder that we can't depend on decision makers in our organization to help the system garden grow.
Not allow despair to grow. It's like it's literally like you were talking about gardening. Like if you have the good things growing, the weeds don't have space to grow. This is it. This is energy exists by certain laws, right? And, um, when we understand that we are a collective of energy at work, um, that's what we are.
That's what we will always be. We can understand that, yes, we are susceptible to the energy of others, and we are susceptible and vulnerable to energy that pre, pre existed, you know, before we arrived at the work, into the job, into the workplace, into the building, whatever it might be. That there was preexisting energy and it can be difficult to change that energy, but we have to also understand that we ourselves are contagious energy, contagious, infectious energy at all times in every space and that gardening of our own well being is a matter of consistency and accountability.
I do garden, you know, I'm looking at my garden right now. If Naomi, if I neglect it in any way. The garden shows me if I, you know, if we neglect our bodies, our body loves us, you know, it's, um, it really communicates with us at all times. And so if it needs attention to something, it lets us know, it lets us know by symptomology, right, uh, by, by the emergence of signs and spare is a sign in the body of the workplace that's calling out for attention and saying, um, Somebody, anybody, everybody come help, come take care of this, this one thing, come take care of this thing.
And in taking care of this thing, you will be taking care of every other thing because it's all interwoven. So we get overwhelmed sometimes when we feel that everything needs to be overhauled. This is just such a toxic place. We just got to scrap it and start from the beginning, which of course never happens.
But the storytelling that says the way we treat each other in our staff meeting is intimately tied to how we are going to treat each other in the hallways and in the break room, in the cafeteria, at our desks and our offices and how we treat each other via email communications and phone calls and how we treat our clients, how we treat the community.
So by virtue of the indelible web of interbeing, if we care for. That aspect of the garden that has to do with our staff meetings, we are going to be caring for the garden itself and consistency is an aspect of accountability. It's not enough to say, Hey, y'all, we're going to have a staff appreciation day, you know, in March.
So just if you're having a rough time now in November, just hang on for a few months. We're going to get to you. We got it on the calendar. You cannot calendar well being. You cannot calendar healing. In a workplace. Accountability speaks to the idea that if I'm not breathing, I'm dying. So, consistency.
Consistent. investment in healing and well being and growth in your organization day to day, not calendared because that says that it's not, it's not actually a priority. If it were a priority, it wouldn't be on a calendar. If staff appreciation were a priority, you wouldn't have one staff appreciation day a year.
So one of the medicines that I arrived at and we discuss in the book, but that I, um, arrived at just for life is that, you know, we, we require as living things, we require celebration, affirmation, confirmation, and appreciation. Those are not things that we should storytell to ourselves and each other and say, well, only children need that because children are, are young and growing and they need all that love on them.
But we're, we're grown folks. We're professionals. We've got our credentials and degrees and we shouldn't need all that feel good stuff. We should just do the work. You know, that's an echo of a very old, uh, toxic, counterproductive mentality. Some could say that it's tied to toxic masculinity or patriarchy or the imbalance between the divine feminine and masculine.
But nonetheless, this idea that, um, the idea that we as adults, as professionals don't need consistent watering. With celebration, appreciation, affirmation, confirmation from ourselves, first and foremost, and from each other. The idea that we don't need that is a misunderstanding and a missed opportunity for healing and growth.
So we, we, we are all creative. We can come up with beautiful ways, some subtle and small that don't take up, uh, resources don't take money that don't take much time to really water ourselves in each other. These are things that we just have to have a will and a determination to stop and pause and be still reflect on and come up with how can we water each other?
And ourselves, I think this, the correlation of what you're talking about when we think about workplace turnover and departures and whether you stay or whether you go is it just gets to the core of all, all of it. Uh, how do you feel when you show up in that workspace? How are you supported to do the work?
How are you supported as a human besides the work? All of those things. I would love if you could talk a little bit about your own relationship with change and transition. Oh, thank you. Change and transition. Okay. So you when you when you speak the question and it lands on me where I immediately where my molecules immediately go to is the beginning.
So I need to take a look. Then at how I began in life, which for me, I was an orphan born. I was born in the desert in New Mexico, and so I was born immediately with loss and separation and trauma. Therefore, so. Loss of, uh, family and therefore culture and, uh, generational, uh, wealth. Culturally speaking, the wisdom of, uh, of our grandparents, right?
The wisdom of the, of the old ones. So when I was growing up, I would say that my relationship with, with change, uh, what was the other word you used? Was it loss? Change and transition. Transition. A lot of children who experience displacement, family displacement, Have a difficult relationship with change and transition.
And, uh, for you, that's pretty understandable, right? I don't know. I feel like, um, for me, I was pretty comfortable with it. Maybe because I've always had a deep desire to learn and grow and you cannot learn and grow without change and transition. And so you read a book or a magazine, a comic book, you learn something in class, your brain changes, you change your perspective changes.
So in that sense, maybe I just always had a, an appetite for change and transition. I was always comfortable with moving places around the country. You know, I did realize at some point, it might have been in my 20s, maybe not, but it could have been, I realized that I did have a tight grip on certain identities, and it was the beginning of my understanding that a lot of the suffering we, and this, you know, if you go to Eastern, so called Eastern traditions, You know, they've had a, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, this idea, this understanding that our attachments create our suffering.
And, um, I started to look at, oh, what are my identities and what ways are those identities serving me? And in what ways are they actually harming me, keeping me from change and transition that I actually need that will be beneficial or also. Allowing those in my life, in my relational spaces to change and grow and transition.
What is, you know, what does that feel like when loved ones change and transition? What does it, what does it feel like to me when someone in an indigenous way changes to life, you know, they pass over, they, they cross over. What is, what is my relationship with that? What about the ending of relationships, the beginning of relationships?
How am I? Feeling inside with all that. So I began to examine that through the lens of identity and how I saw myself, what I saw myself as, and, um, as I've lived and as I've continued in my work in particular, in support of, uh, people in their, in their journeys as well, and in the workspaces as well, I have seen that our resistance to change, which is very prevalent.
Um, even if it's positive change, even if it's been made clear how it might benefit us, there's a lot of resistance to change that occurs in a workplace, right? Like some people, they, they have a hard time with someone even just, you know, uh, coming into their space and moving their chair, moving their pencil that, you know, it causes a lot of anxiety.
So, so like, this is our condition. This is our condition for me. It's been about just making sure that I'm checking in with myself. About how I'm feeling. What is what is the particular change or transition stirring up in me? And generally, um, I'm able to identify the roots of whatever is being stirred up.
So the self reflection and examination is usually immediately beneficial. Pays off. Having conversations with others about the change or transition is almost always helpful if those are people that you trust and you, you feel good about and you feel care about you and you feel care about themselves and they are in a condition of wellness themselves, then those conversations about change and transition are the kind of storytelling that oxygenates the change in transition, lets it breathe more, lets it become less pressurized.
So for me, you. Change and transition can, of course, represent movement into unwellness. It can also represent movement out of unwellness. There's a potentiality there that needs to be honored. Change and transition is, of course, the nature of life. It's happening in every moment. The question is, how do we relate to it?
And that's where I feel like we have the opportunity to, to garden some beauty. I love that you, I mean, I love everything that you say. I really, what stuck out to me was when you talked about needing to start at the beginning. I think that's a wise way for everyone listening to also think about your relationship to change, change and transition.
Because if you go back to the beginning, that can help inform your perspective. And there's, I don't know if you've read the book by Tyson, um. And I'm not, I don't remember his last name. Yama, Yama something. He talks about your perspective and, and what you consume. So he said if you hold your hand, uh, palm fingers together, um, that's what you're consuming, that's the change, that's the transition, that's what you're learning.
And your fingers with your, your other hand with your fingers splayed so that you can see through you. Them to the palm behind is your perspective, and so someone else might have the exact same change, the exact same transition opportunity, the exact same situation at work, but when you bring your splayed hand with your perspective over the top of it, it changes how you interact with the thing, and I've always just thought that was so poignant around our individual response to change.
Is so informed by where we started. So informed again, also who you trust and who's in your relationship of networks that you can reach out to. I also love that you talked about letting change breathe more. So powerful. Thank you. Thank you. No. And the part of that breathing, Naomi, I feel we can call grief.
We need to allow ourselves to agree. That's been coming up a lot in my recent sessions with clients. A lot of the cultures that we live in, in this world. Are not conducive to hospitable for grieving. And even if the change seems to everyone around to be a positive change, there's still a grieving that needs to happen.
It reminds me of your recent conversation with June, with JS Park, June's work as a hospital chaplain that go, I'll link that up that episode in this one, because it was just, it was so powerful and grief is also the same thing that That often causes people to not want to address the reality of departures in the workplace is whatever their story is from having said goodbye before.
If it didn't go well, if it was harmful, if it was sad, you know, unprocessed grief can then impact the way that we say goodbye in the future. Oh, man. So and much love to June. He's such a beautiful soul. Who's he? He is by choice every day shows up and embodies the decision to be compassionate and merciful.
And and so I just really love and and and celebrate him and and his spirit as a reflection of. where we need to be going, our direction, right? And I want to say that your work is so sacred because in part, one of the reasons I feel, you know, this concept of leaving well is so beautiful for me because very few people, first of all, attend to it.
Very few people professionally. Pay attention to this in the way that you do and part of why the dyings and birthings that that happen in an organization, in a workplace, in a career, in an industry, part of why it's so vital for us to really pay attention to the dying and birthing to the beginning and ending to the coming and going is because his grief is so much of it.
Grief is a sacred part of our nature, our flow nature, and we are so obstructed by our cultural conditioning from flow that we often exist in a state of stagnation, which then often turns into disease in the body. Disease in our energy, disease in our relationship dynamics, and therefore disease in the work and, and the way it touches a community, it touches a people.
And so what I love is that you are honoring the sanctity of all that it means holistically to come and to go, to arrive and to leave. And I, and the reason I feel that organizations often act and react. In a counterproductive way to employees leaving is because the leadership themselves, the gatekeepers themselves, the administrators themselves are human beings who've experienced trauma themselves with loss.
With comings and goings, they, whether they were children and they got moved around because the parents moved. So they had to, you know, they didn't really ever have anyone to help them process that, uh, heal from that, whatever it is, there's a sensitivity. Now, here they are, and they are in this position at an organization and they've created even a bureaucratic process.
Through which employees leave, and it's one that can be cold. It can be punitive, spiteful, analyzing. It's rarely, rarely do you see here is a compassionate, celebratory, warm process that we have set up for you to lead. And that's because we're, you know, you've got people who, as human beings still feel like the, the, the seventh grader who got rejected at the school dance or you know, the, just, they're having reactions.
And stories attached to the idea of people leaving. So it triggers abandonment in them. It triggers betrayal. When in fact, often times when we leave, It's because of love. It's because we love ourselves. Um, and we want to be well. We love, uh, people and we want to find other ways of serving them and helping them, supporting them.
We love our family and we want to make changes that in our, in our work that are going to be beneficial to our family. We're often motivated by love, and even, even when we are leaving a place because we feel aggrieved by how we've been treated or how the experience has been, that's still us making a choice many times to leave because we love, we love ourselves enough, we value ourselves enough to make this change in caring for ourselves.
And sometimes we leave because we love the organization and its cause, and we feel we're simply not a great fit for it. And that's love too, Dr. Jaya. I feel like, I mean, I know we could not, I don't, I don't just feel it that we could talk about all of this for so much longer and then all the things that we haven't even talked about.
But I'm wondering if you have something that feels. Top of mind or on your heart as we close out our conversation today, it could be on this topic. It could be something else that you'd like to leave the listener with. Thank you for the invitation. It comes to my heart and spirit. Well, we're moving through a lot of change on earth right now.
Change is always happening, but it does feel to many folks to be an intense time. Energetically, there are those people who are paying attention to the planetary alignments that are happening that are very rare. There are people who are paying attention to the genocidal violence in the world or famine or catastrophe.
There are people who are paying attention to just, um, how their family and friends are doing, how they are doing. And, and we're, there is a lot of Dying that seems to be happening a lot of birthing, a lot of change, a seasonal shift, paradigm shift struggles between between souls in terms of just, you know, are we going to care?
Take this planet? How should we care? Take this planet? Um, technology is advancing rapidly. So that's a lot of change that we don't know what to do with. And so, you know, what's what's on my heart is that Actually, it feels to me empathically as though we are grieving in a very deep and broad and, um, multi textured way.
Our hearts are tender, and so in times of tenderness, we can all use more softness and gentleness, and part of that is not just in how we treat each other, but in how we treat our own personal existence, you know, with with deeper breathing. With stillness, with pause, with rest and renewal, uh, and many people in, in our condition of having to just grind, grind, grind, immediately the story comes up that says, I can't afford to rest.
I can't afford to be still. Well, that's the nervous system, nervous system stuck in the fight or flight response, stuck in adrenaline and cortisol, the body's flooded like that, likely for decades. And so it's difficult to disengage from that storytelling gear that says I can't afford to do anything but keep grinding, even though it's killing me.
So what we could use right now, I feel in a season of great tenderness. And loss and revelation, and even as we're starting to open up our eyes and see things in in new ways that are actually old ways, even with that comes a grieving because now in some kind of weird sounding way. We are grieving no longer being asleep and the comforts that afforded us because there is an accountability that comes with being aware of things and conscious of things because now love demands and compassion demands everything in us that is caring demands that we respond to what we see and what we're aware of.
So right now, a tender season, an overwhelming season, and I just am, you know, praying from, from my heart, from my soul, that we will find the reason, the will, the cause, the impulse, the drive, the determination to remember who we are, remember back through time, through generations and centuries, and remember the ways of being that actually felt good to us.
That felt sustainable and can we remember how to work together in, um, in a symbiotic way, in a harmonious way, can we remember what it feels like to not be saturated with competition and conquest impulses and violence? Can we remember in our cellular nature, our archive of molecules, can we remember what it feels like?
Who exist in harmony with all things. And if we can remember that, which I know we can, then we can vision and create from that place. The way the garden really needs to be for us to thrive and flourish. It's our garden, and we are alive, so this is our time as the gardeners. We are that ancestor right now and, um, just praying from the love in my heart for us to find gentleness and find stillness so that we can see and from seeing we can be.
Your comment just now about we are living ancestors. I mean, that's something I've borrowed from you. Um, because you talk about that so much. You are a living ancestor, um, today. And so the decisions we make today, um, impact not only just us, but the rest of the world in that system garden. Dr. Jaya, thank you.
Thank you so much for this conversation. I'm so glad that you said yes. I'm so glad that we had this time together. Thank you for the work that you have done on yourself and the work that you offer to others, um, and your impact. Naomi, I receive all of that and it heals me and feeds me and I, and I am thankful.
Grateful for this time, grateful for this space and this ceremony with you. I'll be lifting you up in spirit as you continue your way. I'm excited for all of us. I'm excited because we are alive and this is, this is our time. So bless you now. Bless you. Thank you. If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well Assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype.
It's quick and easy, and you can find it at naomihataway. com forward slash assessment. It's Naomi, N A O M I. H A T T A W A Y dot com forward slash assessment. To learn more about Leaving Well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, you can also see that information on my website.
It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.